Around the time I was casting Jaws 3, People 0 (a film I hope you never see), Blake Edwards invited me to a screening of his newest comedy featuring an unknown actress. I instantly knew this was the woman I wanted for the female lead in my Jaws sequel, so I arranged for her to meet me at my office at Universal. We then walked to the studio commissary, a bustling, noisy place that sometimes got so loud you had to strain just to hear across the table. But when we entered, the sound level suddenly dropped to zero. I could see every eye in the place staring at us. It was like entering church.

We sat down. Waiters with notes from other diners started to arrive: “Who is she?” “Matty, can I drop by and say hello?” “Introduce me or I’ll shoot myself!” I looked around the room, smiled, and showed her the notes. She smiled too. She was used to it. And that was my first day at Universal with Bo Derek.

—Matty Simmons is the producer of Animal House and other films

This article is featured in the September/October 2017 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/10/18/in-the-magazine/celebrity-encounters-lunch-bo-derek.html/feed1Celebrity Encounters: Reggie Smith, Pinch Hitterhttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/08/22/in-the-magazine/celebrity-encounters-reggie-smith-pinch-hitter.html
Tue, 22 Aug 2017 13:13:34 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=123929In 1979, on a flight from LA to New York, I started a conversation with the man seated next to me. He asked me what I did for a living and I told him I was publisher of National Lampoon. “Wow!” he enthused, “I love the Lampoon!” “What do you do?” I asked. He told […]

]]>In 1979, on a flight from LA to New York, I started a conversation with the man seated next to me. He asked me what I did for a living and I told him I was publisher of National Lampoon. “Wow!” he enthused, “I love the Lampoon!” “What do you do?” I asked. He told me he was Reggie Smith. “Wow!” I echoed. At the time, Reggie was a member of the LA Dodgers, nearing the end of his career as an All-Star outfielder. As we were landing, I asked him what he was doing the next day — the day of Lampoon’s weekly softball game, this week against Warner Publishing. He said he was free, and I invited him to join us.

The game was underway when he showed up, neatly dressed in slacks and a sport shirt. Nobody recognized him. Our team had the bases loaded and I called time. I walked over to Warner’s captain, pointed to Reggie, and said, “This is a new Lampoon employee. He’s coming in now to pinch hit.” Reggie picked up a bat and walked to the plate. The first pitch came in and he swung and ripped the ball about 900 feet. As our team laughed hysterically, I introduced Reggie to the shocked opposing team.

—Matty Simmons is the producer of Animal House and other films

This article is featured in the July/August 2017 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.

In 1962, I became chairman and general partner of the San Francisco Warriors, later to become the Golden State Warriors. The team was awful, but it did have 7’1″ “Wilt the Stilt” Chamberlain, the greatest player of all time as far as I’m concerned. Wilt and I became good friends. I owned harness horses in those days, and he loved to gamble, so he became my partner on several horses. Once, while at Roosevelt Raceway in New York to watch one of our horses race, he pulled out a huge stack of $100 bills, peeled off five or six, and handed them to a friend with betting instructions.

I pointed to the roll. “Hey,” I said, “put that away.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Someone’s liable to hit you over the head and grab that,”

I joked.

“Anyone who wants to hit me over the head is gonna need a ladder,” he snapped back. “If I see someone coming at me with a ladder, I’ll yell for help.”

–Matty SimmonsIn our March/April 2016 issue, Simmons wrote “The Day Cash Died” about being one of the three men who invented the credit card and formed The Diners Club, the first credit card company.

This article is featured in the March/April 2017 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.

]]>The First Credit Card Everhttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/04/04/in-the-magazine/finance/day-cash-died.html
Mon, 04 Apr 2016 12:00:03 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=113796Today we take credit cards for granted, but the concept was brand new — and a bit frightening — in 1950s America.

]]>Today there are more than 2 billion credit cards being used around the world. On February 9, 1950, there were three.

That afternoon, Frank McNamara, who conceived the idea of a credit card to be honored by restaurants, carried Diners Club card number 1000. His partner Ralph Schneider had 1001, and I, at the time their publicity man and very soon to be in charge of all sales and marketing, had 1002.

Card 1000 was first used when the three of us had lunch that day. The restaurant was Major’s Cabin Grill, which was adjacent to the Empire State Building where Schneider and McNamara had their offices. McNamara ran a small loan company, and Schneider, a Harvard Law School graduate, practiced law from that office. Major’s Cabin Grill no longer exists, but my memory of that day is vivid. The owners of the restaurant, Major Satz and his son, Buddy, stood some 20 feet from us watching after we finished lunch. McNamara pulled out his wallet and handed the first credit card ever printed to the waiter, who was puzzled but then suddenly remembered. He turned to the major, who nodded. The waiter walked off and came back with a triplicate sheet, which had a rectangular box with the price of the lunch and a space for a tip. There were two carbon sheets between three pages, so that when McNamara signed for lunch, the signature would appear on all three sheets. As though he had rehearsed for this — which he had — the waiter pulled out sheet number three and handed it to McNamara. The top copy was to be sent to the Diners Club, and the middle copy was kept by the restaurant. McNamara turned to Schneider and me and smiled.

Schneider

McNamara

I first met with McNamara and Schneider a few months earlier, when they had outlined their plan. McNamara had a “great idea” that involved owing money on dining charges — hence the name Diners Club. But it wasn’t being well received. Restaurant owners didn’t know who McNamara was. Since I was a press agent for many leading restaurants and nightclubs, I had been recommended as someone who could help.

The scheme was simple: McNamara and Schneider would issue charge cards to be used at New York–area establishments. Every month, they’d bill the user of the card for his charges during the previous 30 days. The cardholders would be charged nothing, the restaurant would receive 93 percent of the total, and Diners Club would get the rest.

The idea didn’t sound very good to me. I’d never charged for anything in my life; I paid cash for everything. I said I’d think about representing them, left the office, and simply forgot about it. But Schneider was insistent. We met for a drink and he went over all the good points of McNamara’s idea: You don’t have to carry a lot of cash. You get a receipt for your own bookkeeping. And perhaps most importantly, you have a receipt for a tax write-off if you take out a potential customer or client.

Interview with author Matty Simmons

I agreed to take on the account and proceeded to convince several of my clients to honor the cards. Fourteen restaurants were listed on the back of the credit card. The Diners Club was in business.

Now it was up to me to get cardholders. I pitched the project to Richard Wadell, an editor for Business Week, which was an ideal place to introduce Diners Club, with its appeal to businessmen. Within a few weeks of publication, there were more than 8,000 Diners Club cardholders. By the end of the year, membership was near 100,000. The idea was clearly a success, but the company was losing money. “You’ve got to charge for the card,” I insisted. McNamara didn’t agree: “Nobody will pay for a credit card. More volume will make this work.” Schneider listened to both of us and then shrugged and said, “What have we got to lose? We don’t have the money to wait for more volume. If we don’t charge for the card now, we’re out of business.” I clinched the argument when I pointed out that “people who use the card will pay a couple of bucks a year for it, and the people who don’t will drop it.”

That’s exactly what happened. We charged $3 yearly for membership, and about half the users dropped out. But the other 50 percent paid the three bucks. The company was immediately profitable, and within three years we had nearly 500,000 cardholders, and the three of us gave up our other jobs to work fulltime on Diners Club.

The idea didn’t sound very good to me. I’d never charged for anything in my life; I paid cash for everything.

When, as the head of public relations, I was asked how McNamara had first come up with such an innovative concept, I made up a story that quickly became accepted as fact: McNamara, I said, had been caught short of cash one day after having lunch and recalled Edward Bellamy’s 1888 book Looking Backward, which predicted that sometime in the 20th century, cash would not be used but, instead, some kind of credit card.

Not a word of that story was true. McNamara never read the book. The idea came to him when he was sitting on a commuter train. But thanks to him, Bellamy’s prediction would, in fact, come true.

I started publishing a newsletter that was sent with the monthly bills. It became so popular that it was relaunched, first as Diners Club News, and then as The Diners Club Magazine, which included paid advertising.

Later, the name would be changed to Signature, with an additional $3 subscription fee added to what had become a $7 membership charge. Signature was the first magazine to carry mail-order ads that gave the purchaser the ease of simply filling in his credit card number with the order. This, of course, was the forerunner of today’s TV and radio mail-order advertising, a billion-dollar industry. Huge online businesses like Amazon have business models that are really based on our original Signature innovation: buy with your credit card.

But despite all the success, McNamara felt that the company had reached its full potential, and, in 1952, he wanted to sell his shares. Alfred Bloomingdale, the department store heir, and some associates had started a competitive company called Dine & Sign a year earlier, but it had floundered. Bloomingdale bought out McNamara for $500,000, a figure that would be a fraction of the eventual worth of the stock that he purchased, and merged the two companies.

The credit card craze didn’t take long to spread quickly beyond New York. Within a few years, it was all over the United States as well as Canada, Mexico, and England. But it was probably Al Bloomingdale who was responsible for making Diners Club an international icon.

Al was a great guy who had more friends than anybody I’d ever known. His next-door neighbor in L.A. was Buddy Adler, head of production at 20th Century Fox. Together, they cooked up an idea for a movie, The Man from the Diners’ Club, and Columbia Pictures made it with Danny Kaye starring.

Charlie Powell and Buddy Young were then the heads of marketing and publicity for Columbia. They came to me. “Well, you know the credit card business and you’re a marketing man,” they said. “How do we kick this picture off?” My brother Don, also a press agent, and I came up with the idea of taking a town somewhere near New York and for 24 hours putting it exclusively on credit cards. No cash for anything. It was to be a sign of the future. We issued credit cards to everybody in Winsted, Connecticut. I wrote the following article on March 12, 1963, that appeared on the front page of the local Winsted Evening Citizen:

CASH DIED TODAY!

This is an obituary. It’s about something that’s always been very near and dear to us. It’s about something people have too much of, others have barely enough of, and some, who love it fondly, seem to get rid of it as soon as they get it. Cash, which was born several thousand years ago, the son of Barter, the adopted child of Trade, died today in Winsted, Connecticut, a small American city on the banks of the Mad River.

The doctors who treated the patient before it died in Winsted came up with the following diagnosis: Why did cash die? It got dirty. It ripped. It faded, and people lost it and had no way to claim it if somebody else found it. When you had some of it, somebody was always trying to borrow some from you. When you used it, you had to stop and count it and examine it, and so did the person you gave it to. Sometimes it was too big for a cab ride and too small for dinner. It was easily gambled away and carried some ten-odd million germs per bill. It was absolutely irreplaceable when accidentally dropped into the family incinerator and was something you had to worry about having too much of when walking down a dark street and too little walking into an expensive store.

Cash will be missed. People got used to it, but cash was replaced in Winsted today and may eventually be replaced everywhere by something else people have become used to — the credit card.

The Diners Club, one of cash’s most powerful adversaries since it was born in 1950, was appropriately enough the chief pallbearer at cash’s funeral today. This day in Winsted saw 10,000 people do all their buying without cash. They used only a Diners Club card.

For those who will grieve for cash, we are delighted to be able to tell you that its death was painless. The exact time of that death was 12:01 AM March 13th, Winsted time. The time the modern world caught up with an elderly system that simply gave way to a simpler, more convenient, and efficient one.

The cash-free day went off perfectly. The people of Winsted used credit cards for all their purchases: groceries, taxis, clothing, everything. No problems — buy and sign. At the end of the day, Schneider shook my hand and said, “This is it. This is the future.”

The Winsted experience taught us that using the card for everything would work. We learned that people wanted to sign for everything and get one bill. The name Diners Club came to mean, simply, “Charge it!”

Today, 72 percent of American consumers hold and use at least one credit card.

Schneider, the steady, sensible man-in-charge, died in 1964. Al Bloomingdale, then the company’s biggest stockholder, became president and chairman of the board. I stayed, continuing as executive vice president in charge of sales, marketing, and publishing.

In the mid-’60s, Diners Club went through a period when several major companies gained control. In 1981, Citibank acquired the company. In 2008, they sold it to Discover, who made the deal because of the international presence of Diners Club, for $165 million.

I left the company in 1967. Signature was flourishing, but I wanted to concentrate on publishing only. With the sale of the company, I decided it was time to leave.

A year after I left, something new came to the industry: the computer. By 1968, the company was totally computerized, and everything went haywire — addresses got lost, statements were incorrect, and with the onslaught of Visa and MasterCard, Diners Club started to fade. It’s still in operation, and although its popularity is comparatively sparse in the United States, it’s sizeable in other countries where foreign operations were franchised and are run by domestic investors. The company currently reports it has 5 million cardholders worldwide.

According to recent surveys, Visa is the world’s biggest credit card system, with nearly 850 million cards in circulation. MasterCard trails it by about 83 million cards, and American Express has some 113 million members.

The last 65 years have seen the most numerous and amazing changes in the history of mankind. We’ve walked on the moon, and our cameras and rockets explore the universe. Many diseases have been conquered, and our lifespan has dramatically increased. And, of course, computers and the Internet have totally revolutionized our lives.

But the credit card — one of the most notable innovations, which touches almost everyone on the planet — has nothing to do with science or technology. It isn’t even very intricate. It’s just something that a guy who ran a small loan company thought up one day on a commuter train on his way home to Long Island.

]]>3 Days in Vegashttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2010/07/26/humor/3-days-vegas.html
Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:29:27 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=25440Cousin Phil gambled on a big win, but Sin City taught him a different lesson about playing hunches-and going for broke.

]]>I know Phil would never lie to me. He’s confided in me since he could talk, and told me secrets that all turned out to be true—our mothers were sisters, and they had the same relationship; they told each other everything.

So when my cousin Phil told me about his three days in Las Vegas, I believed him. It sounded like a movie, but it happened to him.

It starts like this: Phil is a junior executive at a big company in Chicago. One day his boss called him in and told him he was going to represent the company at a trade show in Las Vegas. Pretty exciting feather in his cap. He’s single, got a nice little apartment, and just bought a luxury car. He’s doing well—very well.

So, he packed his fine Italian suitcase, which he bought with bonus money his firm gave him, stuck $400 in his wallet, and took off to Sin City, deciding to drive and see a little of the country.

In Denver, he found a book called Beating the Games in Vegas. He stayed up most of the night reading it. As he got in his car in the morning, he decided that his game would be “21.”

He detoured to visit Provo, Utah. He liked the name—Provo—there was something about it that made him smile. While there, he found a book that appealed to him as much as the name Provo. It was simply titled Moe on 21. “The book,” the cover said, “will make you a winner at the table.” Phil memorized nearly every line in the book. He arrived in Vegas early in the morning, got some sleep, went to the trade show, checked in and shook some hands, then went to the casino. He got a hundred dollars worth of $5 chips, then strolled along the 21 tables, watching players and reconnecting each of their “moves” to what “Moe” had written. Most of them, he found, obviously did not know how to play the game.

Phil sat down at a table and put a $5 chip in the card box. He won immediately, doubling his bet. He then lost six hands in a row, picked up his remaining chips, and left the table. “Dealers can get hot,” Moe had written. “Never forget, it is gambling.”

Phil played some more and won back his losses. This went well into the night. By 3:00 a.m., he was ahead. Now he sat alone at a table, just Phil and the dealer. He was soon joined by a seedy, elderly man with a soiled tie at half mast, badly in need of a haircut and shave, with two $100 chips. He pushed them into play. His face card was a six. He asked for another card and turned over his hand. He had 26. He busted out.

Phil couldn’t resist giving this unfortunate man some advice. “The dealer had a five up,” he said. “You shouldn’t hit on 16.”

The man looked at him in disgust. “How do you know?”

“Here, in this book, Moe on 21, by Moe,” said Phil.

The man nodded. “I know,” he said. “I am Moe.” He got up and started to walk away, but then turned to Phil. “Sometimes,” he hesitated, “you gotta forget what the book says and just play a hunch.”

The next day, Phil went back to the trade show, but all he could think of was what Moe said after going against his own advice. Phil had reread Moe’s book, and there it was, in bold print: “DON’T,” the line read, “PLAY HUNCHES! 21 is a game you can win if you play it right.” But this, obviously, wasn’t true. Moe looked like he was done, broke, busted. Why was he now playing a “hunch?” Because it’s more exciting. That was what Phil decided.

That night, Phil went back to his room, got his stash, which had grown substantially the previous night, and went back to the casino. He stopped at a roulette table. “Provo,” he said to himself, “five letters.” He took his entire pocketful of $100 chips and put them on number five. The wheel went round, and the silver ball hopped and spun and landed on his number.

He now had more than $5,000. He walked to the 21 tables. He played only hunches, and by midnight, he’d won $96,000.

But things started to change. At 3:20 a.m., he counted his chips. He had just about $10,000 left. He’d lost. He was tired and hungry.

He scooped up his chips and turned to leave, then collided with someone and the chips flew to the floor. “I’m sorry,” a voice said. And there, helping him pick up his chips was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Gladys and I’m clumsy.” She handed him the rest of the chips and he smiled at her.

“I’m starving,” he said. “Would you like something to eat?”

So, they ate and talked. She said she was in the carpet business in Oregon. No husband. No boyfriend. Just taking a couple of days off on her own. They walked up to his room, and she poured them a couple of Scotches from the mini-bar. … He woke up two days later with a terrible headache. His $10,000 in chips were gone, as were his credit cards, cash, and car keys.

Leaving the hotel that day, he walked through the casino, and there was Moe, clean-shaven and wearing an expensive suit, a pile of $100 chips in front of him. He saw Phil and smiled. “Sometimes you play hunches,” he said. “And sometimes you go by the book.”

Phil went back to the convention and borrowed money from a friend to get home. “I did great,” he told me. “I went to Vegas in a $60,000 Cadillac and went home in a $600,000 Greyhound bus.”

Phil told me that someday he was going to go back to Vegas, play it by the book, and maybe run into Gladys again.

But then he met Blanche, who works in human resources at his company, and they fell in love and decided to get married. He asked her where she’d like to go on their honeymoon. She’d already thought about it.

“I’d like to go somewhere,” she said, “where there are bright lights, great shows, and gambling.”

]]>Getting Old with a Young Kidhttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2010/03/01/humor/simmonshumor.html
Mon, 01 Mar 2010 05:00:01 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=19756“We’re having a baby,” he told me proudly.

]]>It was more than 20 years ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday.

My friend Marvin and I were sitting at our favorite delicatessen on 7th Avenue. I was eating a turkey on rye. He was eating a pastrami and salami combo with side dishes of fries and beans.

“We’re having a baby,” he told me proudly.

I was just about to take a bite of my sandwich, but I put it back down on the plate and looked at him. “But Marvin,” I said, “you’re 60 years old.”

“Sixty-two, but Sarah’s only 40, and she couldn’t be more excited about it.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “Marvin,” I said, “when the kid’s 13 years old, you’ll be 75.”

“But,” he said, “a young, vibrant 75.”

“Your kids by your first marriage will be in their 50s. Your grandchildren will be older than this one.”

He smiled proudly. “Pretty good, eh? And you know something, older men with young kids is a very now thing. Tony Randall, Larry King, Woody Allen, Charlie Chaplin—all men over 60 who had little kids.

“And you know the singer Julio Iglesias?”

“Of course.”

“Well, his father was 89 when Julio was born, and the next year his mother had another kid when his father was 90.”

“He sounds like a heck of a man.”

“He died right after the new kid was born.”

Sometime later, I got a birth announcement from Marvin. There it was, a picture of Marvin and Sarah holding an infant. My friend was beaming as if to say, “From these loins sprung this child.” The card revealed that the baby’s name was Lola and she weighed 7 pounds, 3 ounces.

I moved to California soon after that and didn’t see Marvin for nearly 14 years. We reunited at the same table in the same deli. I had the turkey sandwich. He had a bowl of chicken consommé with crackers.

“Did you notice I was limping when I came in?” he asked. I said I did. “We had a parents versus girls basketball game at her school last night, and I’m a little sore.”

“How’d you do?”

“I was 0 for 2 from the floor. Lola was guarding me.”

“How’d she do?”

“She scored 60 points while I was guarding her.”

“How long did you play?”

“Four minutes. By the time I got to midcourt, she was already coming back the other way. All the other parents were in their 40s.”

“And you’re 75.”

“Seventy-six. After the game, the coach told me, ‘Your granddaughter played very well.’” He paused, “I get that all the time.”

We met again a few months later. He had two slices of white meat chicken and a boiled potato.

“She’s driving me crazy,” he said.

I took a bite of my turkey sandwich.

“She has the prettiest blonde hair, soft and curly. Comes down to her shoulders.”

I nodded as I chewed.

“She dyed it red. Red! I mean American-flag red, fire-truck red!” He ate a small piece of chicken. “We had a huge fight. She told me, ‘You’re not the boss of me!’ ”

I nodded. “I guess you’re not.”

“Well, now she wants to get a tattoo, and I said absolutely not. Positively not.”

We didn’t meet for a year or so.

“By the way,” I asked, “did she ever get the tattoo?”

He stared down at the tea and cookies he’d ordered.

“Yeah. Two. The one on her arm says ‘Rebellion.’ The one on her butt says ‘Mario.’ ”

“Nothing. That was the day I came home from the hospital after my bypass. When I did bring it up, she said that she doesn’t smoke or drink but all her friends do, so why can’t she?”

“What’d you say to that?”

“I didn’t want to fight. My arthritis was killing me. But, I did draw the line with the body piercing.”

“Her ears?”

“Her bellybutton. I told her there would be severe consequences if she did.”

“Like what?”

“I’d kill her.”

I sipped my diet cream soda.

Lola was 17 when Marvin and I met again. He had a cane.

“Bursitis,” he explained. He ordered hot water with a slice of lemon.

“I bought her a car,” he told me.

“Well,” I said, somewhat jokingly, “whatever Lola wants, Lola gets.”

He didn’t laugh. “In three months she’s had three accidents and two tickets.”

“Kids,” I shrugged.

“She was driving and she went up a one-way street, through a red light, and hit a police car.” He paused. “That’s when I had the heart attack. The paramedics said it happens often —and that older parents shouldn’t drive with their young kids.”

“Did she lose

her license?”

“Yeah, but Freddie drives her around now.”

“Who’s that?”

“Her new boyfriend.”

“What’d she do about the tattoo?”

“She had it colored over and had them put ‘I love Freddie’ on her other buttock.”

Illustrated by Robert Saunders

“She’s a real romantic.”

“She’s gonna be a high school senior soon. She’s got a million friends. When they come to the house, they play the music so loud I have to take my hearing aid out. High-pitched sounds drive me crazy.”

“Like a dog.”

“Yeah. But she did bake a cake and bring it to me when I was in the hospital for my prostate.”

“You OK?”

“Yeah. I’m perfect now, except for the eye thing.”

“The eye thing?”

“Macular degeneration. Can’t see too well anymore. It’s all right. Hey, I’m pushing 80, and I still walk the dogs.”

“Oh yeah. The dogs. How old are they now?”

“The poodle is 14, and the schnauzer is 12. They can’t see either.”

“The blind leading the blind.”

I didn’t see Marvin for more than four years after that. We met at our deli. I had two soft-boiled eggs. He had the pastrami and liverwurst combo with Russian dressing and a side of sour pickles. No cane. Still had most of his hair. Didn’t look 82.

“You’re looking great,” I said.

“It’s Lola,” he said, “She just makes me feel so good.”

I looked at him quizzically.

“She graduated Princeton summa cum laude and got offers from several big companies, but she wants to write. She got a $50,000 advance from a major publishing house, and she’s gonna write her first book.”

“Wow, that’s great. What’s she going to write about?”

“Growing up with an older parent.”

He took a swig of his beer.

“You know,” he said. “Whatever problems I had with Lola weren’t her problems; they were mine. She was just growing up, and I was just growing old. We were on the phone for an hour last night, and she read me the first chapter of her book.”

He took another sip.

“I guess Sarah and I did a pretty good job,” he said, smiling proudly. I noticed he still had most of his teeth, too. Then he started eating that awful sandwich.